Windows 7 – Don’t Rush It.

That’s a cautionary statement, a metaphor, and a realization. I had a LOT of issues with this installation and I’m not even at a point where I can benchmark. 3… maybe 4 installations at this point and I think I’ve finally got it. I put in another HD so I could avoid RAID issues and I still run into them.

My motherboard has 10 SATA ports 4 on one SATA controller, 6 on nVidia SATA RAID. I avoided trying to bring over the RAID right away, instead having a single HD on the ontroller but not actually in RAID mode and STILL ran into issues. 7 even played with my RAID 1 a bit and broke the mirror after I installed the drivers but I really think that’s more nVidia since it was completely dependent on their drivers. If nVidia didn’t try and break whatever BIOS RAID existed when they installed their Windows software I might have not been impacted, but instead they gave me a minor heart attack by breaking my mirror. I restored it by killing the secondary RAID mirror and reallocating it via a rebuild to the first but dang if it didn’t make me fear for my data in the meanwhile. I’ve lost too much data, finally learned to go mirror vs striping and this is how I am taunted. Whatever – worked out ok in the end after rebuild.

I finally have my nVidia control panel as I remember it, SLi and all. I can finally do some performance testing, and that’s what I’m after.

PhysX off the onboard 780a SLI chip
Enabled SLi for the 2 x 285 2G EVGA cards
clicked apply… and… we have liftoff!

A system rating shows they’ve gone past the 5.9 max rating and I now get 7.9s on everything except the hard drives. However, Windows 7 is not running off my striping array so it’s not really expected I’d get the best performance. It’s all awaiting my theory of 2 x 120G SSD drives in Striping. I can’t think of anything that could be faster. I don’t know what that might drive to game performance but if previous experience is any indication – that’s a sure cause to make me drop a hard earned dollar.